Content Migration

Mergers and Acquisitions are high profile events and the need to seamlessly combine two disparate content stores and deliver a consistent message to users is vital. To achieve success the project team needs to deal with issues such as brand compliance, application of a single information architecture, content model, and corporate taxonomy. These issues require careful thought and should be an integral part of planning for any merger.

So, why then do so many mergers, carefully thought out in terms of strategy, markets, and organization, stumble on the integration of technology and the valuable content of the user community? One reason is that IT assets and important website and intranet collateral are often absent from the due diligence process.

Research suggests that only around one in six of these projects bring in the data or content migration portion on time and within budget. The main reason for overruns is a failure to fully understand the content to be migrated. In other words, the data sources are neither fully known nor completely understood.

Failure to include content within the due diligence process can lead to high profile, post merger quality issues, such as a lack of brand governance and poor link cohesion.

So, what are the key points to think about when embarking on an M&A project involving digital content. Here are some pointers....

-    Undertake a thorough Content Discovery phase to ensure that you understand the size, structure and scope of the acquired property and the effort required to create a unified content store
-    Consider whether your existing hardware and infrastructure can cope with the additional content and increased numbers of authors and consumers
-    Talk to the content owners and make sure they are involved in any decisions that will affect future content usability
-    Produce a plan with key milestones and deliverables to track progress towards a smooth integration
-    Plan to implement a common IA, content and metadata model which can encompass all content
-    Think about the key customer-facing sections of your site

• branding must be consistent
• navigation and search must function reliably for all content
• duplicate, conflicting and non-compliant content should be identified and removed

-    An ongoing content governance model should be adopted to ensure all future content conforms to the organization’s digital content policies

Removing risk from these projects is a Vamosa speciality, but even without professional support, these pointers will help to keep you on the right track. There are many pitfalls for the unprepared, but taking an organized and structured approach actually enables a merger to benefit content quality, as it is the ideal time for content cleansing and removal of redundant and obsolete content.

Although high risk and highly visible, tackled in the right way, M&A projects provide a platform to a more streamlined and efficient digital content store.


 To learn more about the typical barriers to starting a content migration, download the 'Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality' White Paper.

When choosing a new CMS a customer’s primary concern is almost certainly authoring-based. That is to say, a clear vision for the future of content is established well before the vendor is chosen. There are many CMSs to choose from and they vary greatly in scope, functionality and ease of use. You may be faced with a large influx of new content which is no longer manageable under the current CMS; or you may come to the realization that your current vendor no longer supports your vision for your website in the functionality it supports (it’s not uncommon to find content authors use tricks to get around the limitations of your CMS); or you may simply be tired of that clunky user interface and want something with a little more pizzazz.

What’s not always considered is backwards compatibility with existing content. Ideally, undertaking a CMS migration into a new platfom represents a translation of data, resulting in the achievement of value. Otherwise, a content migration can leave you with a truncation of content resulting in a functional, but 'lossy' migration. Metadata management is incredibly useful on both sides of a website, internal and external. Content with good metadata is good content ie.  findable! It’s a good idea to have a strategy in translating both content and metadata from your source CMS into the target. It’s all too easy to favor new functionality and componentry in a new CMS over the simple-yet-invaluable little things.

CQ5 is a particular favorite of mine to work with but it’s my belief that a crack team is required to take full advantage of all the features CQ5 has to offer. Not everyone requires a CMS as flashy as CQ5 and there are plenty of other utilitarian options. One thing is clear: regardless of which CMS you choose,  it is imperative you understand what you’re getting in your CMS and that you are prepared to spend the time necessary to get the most out of your investment. We at Vamosa were recently faced with a client coming back to us after a brief disengagement only to reveal that they had decided that their chosen target system did not adequately meet their needs - after months of work on both sides. It’s hard to imagine a more tragic outcome than that! So be sure to take your time deciding which system is right for you, and good luck!










If you are unsure of what CMS is right for you, download the Vamosa Consulting Service CMS Vendor Selection Business Results Sheet and see how Vamosa may be able to help you.

We recently launched a suite of awesome SharePoint Tools.  While using the tools internally, I came accross a subtle but cool technique to copy a SharePoint list with dependent content types to the right place in another site collection!

At first glance this task seems to be simple enough considering there are some tools on the market that can let user to grab a list and drag it / drop to the other site collections. Still, you must take into consideration the dependencies within the SharePoint architecture before doing this drag and drop; the list may have content types defined in the parent site, not within the source site itself.

Let’s, for the sake of simplicity, consider two sites: root site of the site collection (Publishing Portal in this case) and its sub-site (Hadrian's Site).

The tricky part is that the parent site (Publishing Portal) contains the definitions for content types. And the sub-site (Hadrian's Site) contains the list itself with all views and content.  We want to keep it that way in our new world to comply with our Content Migration Strategy.

If we continue with a simple drag and drop then we will end up with a list in our destination sub-site that has the content-types directly associated with it instead of the parent site. This is not ideal because acordding to our Content Migration Stragety all vehicle-based content types must be created in the site collection root with the intent to reuse them across the sub-sites.

A workaround to this dilemia would be to copy the list twice. First, to copy it to the root site of the destination site collection even if it ultimately should not go there. Unlike the first copy attempt, this time do not copy content, permissions, workflows or views related to the list. Instead just copy the list itself and all dependent content types. This way, all content types and fields will be automatically created together with the list in the right spot of the destination site collection. There are specific options in a Content Migration Tool like MetaVis Migrator for SharePoint to give the granular control to copy just list with content types.

After this, delete the list from the root site of the destination site collection. All content types created in the root site will still be there because they are defined outside of the list.

Finally to tie things up, copy the same list again but this time – to the right sub-site of the destination site collection. It will create the list and reuse all content types from the root site created during the previous copy. This time, select all options to copy content, permissions and views on the copy list wizard screen.  A helpful hint to preserve the architecture in your target site during your MOSS Migration.

This technique allows to preserve originally designed architecture of SharePoint site collection that involves complex taxonomies of site columns and content type hierarchies.  Make sure you also understand your architecture before you jump in; check out MetaVis Architect to get a complete view of your MOSS properties and build yourself a strong Content Migration Strategy.


 

Download the MetaVis Architect Suite Business Results Sheet
to learn more about moving and classifying content between SharePoint sites.




Content provided by MetaVis for Vamosa

The challenges of content governance are constantly evolving as the volume of digital content published increases exponentially every day and new publishing channels emerge. Who, 12 months ago, for example, could have predicted that Twitter would become such a publishing phenomenon?

Vamosa understands this complexity and we know that dealing with the end-to-end life cycle of content in separate parts can make implementing an effective strategy for managing enterprise content more complex.

In response to enterprise needs, coupled with our understanding of the obstacles to enterprise-wide content management, we have launched two configurable software platforms that incorporate this end-to-end approach to content: Vamosa Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) Suite for Documents and ECoG Suite for Web. 

ECoG Suite for Documents

ECoG Suite for Documents has been designed to enable the transformation of document repositories into clean, usable content stores that can be governed by ECoG policies. The suite automates the life cycle of documents, from creation to on-going maintenance, supporting taxonomy and metadata management, versioning, policies for records management and archiving, and so on.

ECoG Suite for Web

ECoG Suite for Web allows clients to take back control of web content by automating policies for all stages of the content lifecycle, from accessibility to tagging and from broken links to ECMS migration, making it findable, compliant and more usable. By adopting a SaaS approach to web maintenance, web properties are monitored 24/7 so any breach of policy is trapped and resolved.

Most importantly for enterprises, the suites offer all the functionality previously available in separate Vamosa products, including analysis, data cleansing and migration but bundled into a single installation that is then configurable to the customer’s environment and specific ECoG policies.

If you use a Document Management System (DMS) to manage document based content you will already know that one of the key issues faced is how to move existing content into the new system.

On paper document migration looks relatively easy. A team of people could spend the next six months copying files and documents from their existing location into the DMS. However in order to achieve an effective document migration project it is essential that you consider:

•    How many files can one person move in one day? A document migration project of only 100,000 pages might take anywhere between 10 to 100 days to complete.
•    What happens during this move? Do you place a content freeze over all of the files and documents for the duration of the migration project? What about moving attached documents and handling internal and external links? How can you incorporate this functionality into your document migration strategy?

A document migration does not simply mean changing a few attributes and then placing the content into a slightly different information architecture. Document migrations involve the wholesale change of properties, storage, information architecture and content lifecycle, therefore document migration projects tend to involve hundreds of minor changes to very large volumes of data. This can potentially become incredibly time-consuming and frustrating. To reduce this confusion and to improve data quality, eliminate redundant, obsolete and redundant information and match the requirements of your new system, you really need a tried and tested method.

Vamosa Consultancy Practice, with their collective experience gained on over one hundred client projects, can assist in implementing best practice content quality processes; such as when selected to undertake the migration of the website and corporate Intranet for the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Working with integration partner, digital media giant Euro RSCG, Vamosa’s solutions and expertise was the obvious choice to deliver a web and Intranet content migration for Defra.

Gregory Roekens, Technology Director at Euro RSCG said ‘We were asked to provide a best of breed and best value solution to Defra’s business content migration problem and Vamosa’s tools and methods have the reputation as the Central Government standard’.

Vamosa Consulting was able to successfully bring control and structure to all documents across Defra’s content stores, providing, de-duplicated and clean content. As a part of an ongoing Enterprise Content Governance strategy, Vamosa ECoG Suite for Documents also uniquely pinpoints breaches of policy for all document governance areas, and offers an automated process to resolve each breach, allowing document stores to be kept up to code.

Any enterprise looking to manage content knows it has a challenge on its hands. Not only has the volume of content exploded exponentially in the last few years but so has the rate at which content is changing and users’ expectation of a satisfactory experience, whether on the Internet, or simply locating a file on the Intranet or Portal.

Vamosa announced its new consulting services on Tuesday. They offer a comprehensive approach to implementing best practice Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG), focusing on practical aspects, such as content modelling and keyword tagging.

A Vamosa customer – British Council – summarized the need for such expertise perfectly: “We knew there was a lot of out-of-date content, but with so many pages, it was an enormous challenge for us to undertake an analysis on our own. We chose Vamosa because of its Consultants’ expertise.”

The Consulting services are structured around ten different components to provide enterprises with a start-to-finish content strategy, and the added bonus of providing an independent evaluation to support decisions on CMS vendor selection.

A few examples of the different areas of the Practice include:
•    Content Discovery – a comprehensive analysis and assessment of content to optimize performance, reduce Total Cost of Ownership and resolve problem areas before content users complain
•    Migration Programme Management – capitalizes on the expertise of Vamosa experts to migrate content so employees can focus on day to day jobs and avoid the common pitfalls associated with CMS/DMS implementation
•    Keyword Tagging – Valuable keywords and phrases extracted from content and weighted based on relevance, then tagged as metadata making it easier to find

By engaging with Vamosa for consulting services, enterprises can not only be confident of receiving advice gained on hundreds of customer engagements, but also that these will be executed within a structured ECoG framework.

Organizations use SharePoint for a variety of things, from Intranets to Extranets, from Customer Portals to document management and for team collaboration.

Recently there has been a significant amount of discussion around exactly what SharePoint is and what it offers. For example, a recent AIIM article highlights 8 things SharePoint 2010 needs to be a true ECM system. A blog by the Microsoft Team describes SharePoint 2010 in 1 sentence, 8 categories and 40 features. The Rez's SharePoint blog provides a comprehensive comparison of features between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

One element thats there has been great excitement around, is the SharePoint 2010 taxonomy implementation and management across sites and site collections. Organizations must spend time and effort building the appropriate foundation for utilizing the content taxonomy. That is all well and good when a green field project is started, but considerations must be given to data that is already stored in previous versions of SharePoint; how can that information be classified correctly when undertaking a SharePoint Migration? Microsoft does not provide a tool or utility which can be used to apply a new taxonomy and as a result many organizations may become stuck during a MOSS migration.

Vamosa recently announced a partnership with MetaVis to help both existing and new customers get a better ROI and increased value when moving into SharePoint 2010 from SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007 environments, by ensuring the new taxonomy values can be applied to documents.

The MetaVis Suite does not simply help organizations migrate their existing content into the SharePoint 2010 platform; it also provides features such as  a graphical top down view of the web estate and it highlights dependencies between objects. This provides the administrator with a complete view of how their sites are structured. The 'Live Compare' feature of MetaVis provides useful functionality as it allows comparisons of two sites to be undertaken in real-time, listing the differences between sites at the granular level of identifying column differences between content types.

Synchronizing two SharePoint environments at the click of a button is only one of many features offered by Metavis that will help SharePoint Administrators perform their day to day tasks more effectively and efficiently, while ensuring their organization has an effective SharePoint Governance strategy.

MetaVis Migrator for SharePoint allows to use filters to copy content to new location or to tag existing content setting new values for the existing fields. These properties enable an interesting technique to perform a data migration strategy in a slow pace – at the same time as preparing new environment, training users or organizing the existing content.

Sometimes copying data from one SharePoint site to the other one is a quick process that could be done by copying the whole list or library from one place to the other one. However, in other cases this is more complex routine involving copying different items in different locations or migrating portion of data in one day and other portion of data in the other day when users of this content are ready to use new environment. In this later case it could be useful to use combination of some artificial field marking the migrated content in the source site, MetaVis Migrator copy filters and SharePoint views hiding the content that was already migrated to the destination site.

The idea of this technique is simple. First, we will create an artificial Yes/No field in the source list that will indicate that an item is copied to the destination site. By default this field will be “No” for all items / documents in the list.


Then we will go ahead with our SharePoint migration activity selecting portions of data to copy based on some filter condition. The filter will always include the condition to exclude the content which is already migrated based on the state on our artificial columns that we created earlier. Below in an example of such a filter (this time we copy all documents with MK Region equals to Netherlands):


After the copy is completed we use the very same filter that we just used to copy content but this time – to tag selected source data setting our artificial Migrated field to Yes – indicating that this content has been already copied to the destination site. Using the same filter will ensure that all items just copied using this filter will be marked as Migrated.

The fact that all copied content has been marked with certain criteria could be used in a variety of ways. First use is to skip the content which was already copied before when performing new copies to the other places. The second use it to create list view that will hide copied content from the viewers. Below is the example of such a condition in a list view.


Having this condition enabled for the list view will point out that the content is already located in the new destination.
















To learn more about how Metavis MIGRATOR can help you simplify yor SharePoint migration, download the MetaVis Migrator Business Results Sheet.

Content Provided by MetaVis for Vamosa

As noted in a previous post  by Nic Archer it is anticipated that a third of organizations will in time employ a MOSS migration strategy and migrate to the new SharePoint 2010 platform. However in order to maximize organizational efficiency it is essential that all data is prepared prior to the SharePoint 2010 deployment to ensure a smooth content migration strategy.

By defining efficient content taxonomy structures prior to deployment, organizations are able to more easily move content into their new SharePoint environment resulting in improved site architecture and navigation within the new site. This task in itself can involve a significant amount of work before data is ready to be migrated.  If this stage is not meticulously carried out, the value of the content in the new store will be significantly depleted.

The suite of MetaVis tools for SharePoint, now allows SharePoint administrators to reclassify content by assigning new metadata values and new content types during a migration, allowing organizations to migrate more efficiently. Even post migration, MetaVis allows administrators to bulk update metadata, should this be required, further enhancing the findability of data for the user.

With MetaVis, SharePoint administrators can utilize the new Term Store, to graphically re-design and re-architect their content, significantly improving search and discovery of local documents for organizations that are located globally.
By utilizing the capabilities of the new SharePoint environment through MetaVis, administrators will be able transform the web experience, lower the cost of ownership of content management and deliver error free automated migrations, while creating effective content structures in SharePoint 2010 – the ultimate goal for all SharePoint administrators.

To learn more about the suite of MetaVis tools download the MetaVis Architect Suite Buisness Results Sheet.

Yesterday we announced our partnership with MetaVis to be the sole European distributor of MetaVis packaged software tools to help SharePoint Administrators. We will now provide tools that ease the daily task of organizing SharePoint environments for improved search, findability and e-discovery.

Our decision to partner with MetaVis was not made lightly. We evaluated a number of SharePoint migration solutions including Metalogix and AvePoint to ensure we would be providing out clients with the best out-of-the-box product on the market.

The most significant reason we chose MetaVis is because it was developed for the SharePoint 2010 market and therefore provides a more comprehensive solution. The MetaVis Architect Suite not only allows migration, but it allows SharePoint Administrators to graphically re-design and re-architect content so they get the most out of the features and functions of 2010: this is the major differentiation.

When evaluating Metalogix and AvePoint we recognized that they could do simple MOSS migrations, but being developed for SharePoint 2003 and 2007 means they have only been adapted for 2010. The products will not necessarily give you solutions for re-architecting your content and definitely do not provide an easy to use graphical representation of the your content. And as a result, you’ll end up migrating all your content to SharePoint 2010 without the ability to take advantage of all the new features and functions within SharePoint 2010. You’ll need to buy more tools in order to get around this problem, costing you time and money.

The bottom line is that if you need a SharePoint migration solution for 2010 and you are evaluating Metalogix and AvePoint, MetaVis should also be on that list.  We found it to be the far superior solution and we think you will as well.

You wouldn’t move house without taking stock of your content to decide what you need, what you can get rid of and what won’t fit in your new house. Or devising a plan for all the content to be cleansed, refitted and moved. So why would you do it with your enterprise content? It is essential you have a comprehensive content migration strategy.







To find out more about MetaVis,
download the MetaVis Architect Suite Business Result Sheet.

As an experienced Consultant, I find it’s difficult to say when considering a data migration strategy which step in the process is most important. The success of a data migration methodology really depends on all the components of a solution working well from beginning to end. But it’s certainly true that a successful data migration project cannot take place without a robust means to push content into its new home, whatever that might be.

Since virtually every content management system (CMS) on the market is different, there is no silver bullet for loading content quickly and dependably. Each application programming interface (API) is different and can vary greatly in terms of quality style and completeness. Some may require a custom web service, deployed on the target environment and called remotely.

But this solution isn’t quite optimal. What if the client’s target environment is completely inaccessible for some reason? Perhaps the client’s security model forbids deploying foreign services. Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 CMS circumvents the necessity to deploy remote services with its client object model. After getting your hands on the required libraries the SharePoint 2010 API is suddenly at your fingertips. Using this technique, a data migration can be accomplished using a locally deployed custom service after supplying the required credentials!

While I found SharePoint’s client object model to provide a promising new way to connect to a CMS, I thought the API was incomplete and sometimes poorly documented. Luckily, the out-of-the-box web services packaged with MOSS provided the methods I required. I am excited at the prospect that more CMSs will start packaging up libraries that provide the tools necessary to connect to an environment with a remote machine. It simply provides a safer solution for the data migration and one that doesn’t require deploying anything on the client’s machines! The big upshot of the client object model implies that projects are less likely to face resource bottlenecks because additional access to secure systems is not required. A smaller gap between the development and testing periods allows more time for refinements and a better quality data migration solution.

It seems that Microsoft is leading the way in this regard.

  Download our Data Migration - Seven Steps to Success White Paper to gain a further understanding of the data migration best practices that should be considered when beginning a migration project.

In short: when its in a zoo… Bare with me. Common Eland in Zoo

A document is a record of something that has been observed. Such a record can be anything – a utility bill, an employment contract, a sculpture in a museum, or a painting on a wall. All are examples of documents describing something else. The utility bill records and describes your usage of gas and electricity. The employment contract records and describes the details of the handshake you gave at that final job interview. The sculpture or painting documents – there’s that word – a historical event. All these examples of documents are records of something observed by something or someone else.

Paul Otlet (1868-1944), the father of information science, is known for his observation that documents could be three dimensional. As examples of such “documents” Otlet cites natural objects, artifacts, objects bearing traces of human activity (such as archaeological finds), explanatory models, educational games, and works of art.

Suzanne Briet (1894-1989), also known as “Madame Documentation”, states her case through the enumeration of six objects:

•     Is the star in the sky a document? No.
•     Is the photo of the star in the sky a document? Yes.
•     Is the stone in the river a document? No.
•     Is the stone in the museum a document? Yes.
•     Is the antelope in the wild a document? No.
•     Is the antelope in the zoo a document? Yes.

Suzanne Briet rules: an antelope running wild on the plains of Africa should not be considered a document. But if it were to be captured, taken to a zoo and made an object of study, it has been made into a document, it has been made evidence. So there is a process involved in making “the something” into a document – we call it documentation.

As humans, we’ve invented all kinds of devices to aid in the process of documentation: library cards, folders, URLs, bibliographies, tags, taxonomies, reference documents. They form part of the discipline that is documentation and the basis for content management.

With the advent of content management systems we seem to have lost some of the high-level abstract concepts that were clearly laid out in the early parts of the 20th century. As an industry sector, involved in content management, we’ve become too focussed on the implementation details of content management systems and the limitations that these systems face.

Context

“What is metadata? What is a document?” These questions typically go hand-in-hand and are often naively answered by: “the document is a file or a blob that is stored in database but is difficult too manipulate, so the metadata, table rows and columns, are used to facilitate manipulation and describe the document”.

Metadata provides context with which to consume the document. You’ll have seen this in a zoo. You walk up to the antelope enclosure and there’s plaque containing the name, Latin name and a map of the world with a particular part of Africa highlighted describing the antelope and its origin – metadata. The zoo is giving you context with which to understand the antelope document.

The same holds true for documents in a content management system. Documents are stored in a particular context described by their metadata. The folder, the author, draft/publish status, tags, taxonomy are all pieces of metadata to aid the consumer in consuming the document.

That consumer may be the content management system itself as it responds to the query “give me all documents in the /marketing folder” on behalf of a web visitor. The consumer can also be a records management system archiving documents “in a published state and that are older than 24 months”.

Documents never exist without metadata, without context. For example, the print-out of sales figures that I’ve thrown in the wastebasket is a fully-fledged document of our company’s sales figures telling the person that picks it out the wastebasket to treat (read “consume”) the document as a discarded document.

I’ve seen this catch people out on a few content migration projects when they try and de-duplicate content repositories. They classify documents as duplicates based on their contents alone, without ever taking context into account. De-duplication is tricky business because in doing so you are destroying metadata that is right-or-wrongfully been created to help consume documents.

The accurate consumption or manipulation of documents is intrinsically tied to the accuracy and completeness of their metadata. Is the print-out of sales data in the wastebasket to be trusted? Is the sales data accurate? How should the reader consume the document? Look at the metadata! Its in the wastebasket. This opens up the possibility: did I mean to throw the print-out in the wastebasket? Is the metadata accurate? The reader can only make that decision with more metadata. The reader could phone or email me and ask: did you intend to discard that print-out? Thereby creating more metadata and a better context with which to consume the document.

Content management systems merely store metadata, human beings create metadata – often by hand, sometimes using automated tools. The process of generating metadata or maintaining its accuracy is a human process. Computers don’t care about accuracy or completeness.

Adriaan Bloem, analyst at CMSWatch, touches on this by labeling enterprise search as a “brute force” approach. Adriaan also points out that metadata or context is neccessary to communicate. He’s right – otherwise how do we make sense of a document ?

What if metadata contains a document, i.e. when one document describes another? Doesn’t this form of reasoning collapse in on itself?

What if you took a photograph of the antelope and attached it to the information plaque outside the enclosure? So when the antelope is having an off-day and its hiding in the undergrowth, passers-by can still learn about it by reading the plaque. Now you’ve got one document (the photograph) describing another (the antelope), haven’t you? Aren’t both documents? Wrong.

We can describe documents with other documents. Suzanne Briet would argue that the antelope in the zoo is the primary document and any scholarly articles written about it are secondary documents. They provide context around the primary document. There’s is a document and there is context with which to interpret that document – metadata. Nothing else. Document… Metadata… Document… Metadata.

In an English language sentence “things” can be both subjects as well objects, yet can’t be both at the same time. In one situation the photograph is a document, described by metadata from a digital camera (exposure, shutterspeed), in the other situation it is metadata describing the antelope.

Confused? What is metadata ? In any given situation, ask yourself what the document is and by exclusion all that isn’t is metadata.

So what does this means for content management systems ? Are they all broken? Do we need metadata management processes as well as content management processes? Do we need a separate metadata lifecycle to run alongside a content lifecycle ?

The answer to those questions is unfortunately – yes. Yes, we do need separate metadata management processes. Yes, we do need a separate metadata lifecycle. Unless… we stop building content management systems in the naive fashion of blobs for documents and table rows and columns for metadata. We need to start building these systems so that there is no technical distinction between the content store and the metadata store. Having separate stores for content and metadata causes us to duplicate our efforts, causing us to define duplicate processes to support the lifecycle of both document and metadata.

Ironic, since a promise of content management is the removal of duplication.

As unstructured content grows exponentially, businesses need to capture, store, manage, integrate and deliver all forms of content across their enterprise. Knowledge workers  need the right information at the right time to make the right decisions.

Managing unstructured data (web content, email, Blogs, user-generated content) is inherently different, and in many ways more challenging, than controlling its structured counterpart. Controlling this ‘digital landfill’- as AIIM would have it – requires organizations to discover what content they have and understand what condition it is in. Through our extensive experience in enterprise content migration projects Vamosa is only too aware of how frequently organizations are faced with these challenges – for example when we recently worked with IBM.

IBM was required to migrate from their legacy system to Lotus Web Content Management (LWCM) in order to gain control of their digital content. A full understanding of their current content inventory was therefore required to ensure that only the necessary content was migrated.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer IBM conducted a full content audit; which involved crawling all content and nullifying any obsolete or redundant content, ensuring there were no broken links and identifying any outdated pages. Once the appropriate content had been identified, it was enhanced, allowing IBM to remove duplicates and manage version control through automated classification and tagging.

Vamosa Content Migrator was then used to simply, automatically and quickly migrate the required content into Lotus WCM within the project’s timescales. Vamosa solutions allowed the project to be completed up to four times faster than alternative approaches, at a quarter of the price and with no impact on day to day operations.

To learn more about the key implementation steps required in order to achieve a successful migration into IBM LWCM, download the 7 Steps to IBM LWCM Migration white paper.

In part 1 of the series we highlighted some of the steps that can help you obtain maximum value from your content. In this issue, we will further explore some of the solutions that will allow you to overcome the business challenges associated with the digital landfill.

1) Make Sure Your Content isn’t Duplicated

While reducing the noise on your content store is hugely beneficial you need to go one step further; you must ensure that there are no duplication issues.  A Swiss Bank client once told me that attaching a PowerPoint presentation of 1Mb to an email within that bank increases corporate storage requirements by at least 1 GB and produces on average ten versions of the file.  In one search, a single document could exist in 100 different places. That single fact alone highlights how difficult it is to sort out the knowledge from the noise. By de-duplicating your content, you’ll already be streamlining the process. Anecdotally this can reduce the file count by between 50% and 80% – significant in anybody’s language.

2) Find the Holes within Your Knowledge

Look for existing entities in your classification that do not exist within your metadata – the information you have about your content. Holes provide you with the ability to clean information, ensure metadata management is considered by content creators; and if it’s not to get those content creators in line, by setting out content complaince guidelines. That way you’ll be able to ensure content is relevant, findable and clean.

3) Share Knowledge

Content Management Systems work optimally when the content that they are custodians of is focused, relevant and classified and as a result this content compliance issues should be addressed. You need to assess how your content is being consumed and with this information drive your choice of platform as required. When undertaking a data migration strategy, for example emails, a real opportunity exists to be selective about where you store content. One customer was migrating 120,000 user email accounts from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange. When discussing the migration, it was identified that 70% of the storage requirement was generated by attachments. Moving all of the attachments to SharePoint instantly enabled ‘share-ability’ and de-duplication. You don’t need to follow the obvious route when sharing knowledge, rather choose a platform based upon what your business requires.

4) Maintaining Your Knowledge Assets

It is essential to keep on top of your knowledge. If you allow your content to become chaotic, it’s not easy to repair; if you manage it on a weekly basis, maintenance is much easier. Once your content is at a point of usefulness, where it is relevant and findable, keep it there. If you don’t’ look at it for a year, you’ll then see some major gaps in the metadata, incorrect naming conventions, incorrect storage locations etc. If you invest in a pragmatic care and maintenance program, then spotting minor deviations from the documented standard will be easy to monitor, highlight and resolve, allowing you to continually obtain maximum value from your digital landfill.







To learn more about getting the most from your digital landfill,
download the Five Steps to Discovering the Real Shape of your Digital Content White Paper.

In a CNET Q&A with Microsoft Business Division President, Stephen Elop was asked how Microsoft will get businesses to upgrade from the older version of SharePoint they’re already using and ‘in a nutshell, what’s Microsoft’s pitch to large businesses this time around?’ Stephen replied by discussing productivity across the PC, the phone, and the browser and the focus on making sure that people can work better together, taking advantage of the social-networking capabilities, the rich cloud technologies and a variety of other things.

He was also asked about the specific features that the average productivity worker will get with Office 2010 that they couldn’t get in either Google Docs or a prior version of Office. Elop commented that for users of Microsoft’s Outlook product for e-mail and various forms of communication, there are all sorts of capabilities that have been introduced to help people more effectively manage their communications, whether it’s ignoring threads of communication that are annoying, whether it is the ability to work with advanced conversation views to deal with complex communication patterns, or the interoperability established between Outlook and a number of the social-networking environments, such as LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook.

The benefits of SharePoint are certainly there and according to Forrester, a third of big enterprises plan to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 within a year, and that in turn will drive the corporate success of the Office 2010. But while Stephen is thinking of ways to convince enterprises to buy, he’s not thinking about or being asked about how Microsoft suggests large enterprises conduct a MOSS migration and migrate all of their content including documents to SharePoint 2010.

Migration is often viewed as an obstacle to enjoying the full benefits of a new product, but it needn’t be and Microsoft should recognise this early or face low adoption.

There are a few steps that need to occur prior to the upgrade to make it smooth and ensure it is a success.  These include content analysis to understand exactly what exists and a process to clean that content up. SharePoint 2010 is being received well, but it won’t solve many of the issues faced by enterprises unless a clear content migration strategy for upgrade is adopted and the required process of content migration is carried out properly.







MetaVis MIGRATOR is a simple tool for migrating content and objects between SharePoint sites, site collection or servers. Whether you are consolidating, upgrading or simply re-organizing your SharePoint environment. Download the MetaVis MIGRATOR business results sheet of have a free trial.

Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful things to do in life. First, you need to find the new house considering the requirements you need. A 3 bedroom or 4? A big yard or small? Lots of storage or minimal? City or country? Next, you need to negotiate the terms of sale and close on the house. Then comes the actual move. This is the part of the process where you go through the years of built up stuff and decide whether to be rid of it or not. This process often brings to light stuff you haven’t seen for years, broken items you’ve saved ‘just in case’ and some keepsakes. Overall, you are cleansing your household contents.

This same process applies when a corporation approaches its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) decisions. However, it’s a constant surprise these decisions are made without having all of the facts at hand. Knowing answers to questions, such as: how much content exists; how often is content accessed in a week/month/quarter/year; who owns the content; what happens to old content; what content adheres to today’s standards; and when changes are made, how does the change impact on the other content; is the only way to truly understand what is in a corporation’s household content and is an essential part any data migration strategy.

Many ECM novices and veterans most likely have a question mark over what is in the content inventory, so getting to grips with this is often the main problem and is only done when a move is in sight. But content tooling is available and should be used to not just manage content (which most ECM systems already do), but govern it on an ongoing basis. These content tools provide answers to all of the questions that should be known before a content migration is even considered, as you’ll then be better placed to decide on the necessary requirements for the new system.

You wouldn’t move house without taking inventory of your household contents and you shouldn’t make ECM decisions without this analysis either.








Download the ‘Five Steps to Discovering the Real Shape of Your Digital Content,’ 
to learn more or check out the Vamosa Migration Methodology.

The issue of controlling content and privacy popped up in the news last week; as Facebook has reviewed its privacy practices after a new feature exposed private information and wrested control away from users as to what content was shown to whom.

Personally I find the amount of personal information on the public internet  astounding  and this is just the random non-sensitive information. If my birth date gets out on the web, at worst I might get an extra birthday card or two; but corporate entities cannot afford to let sensitive information become public without often facing heavy legal penalty; not to mention what it does to their reputations. Facebook is reported to be losing users as a result of their miscalculation. The more sensitive the information the larger the risk becomes. Structuring content leads to predictable data. Predictable data leads to predictable areas of sensitivity and predictable areas of sensitive material can be controlled and protected.

Now I am not saying that if Facebook had implemented a more cohesive content model and massaged their content into those structures that they wouldn’t have exposed this private information. But I am stressing the importance of understanding the content structure and which portions will be provided to whom. Content Management Systems are one part of this equation – they should control the content as expected so long as it is stored in the right place. That is the key; so long as it is in the right place.

Structure and predictability are cornerstones of any successful migration. Taking content that was once fragmented and moving all the like parts together into a common structure(s) is the first step. And it can be an undeniably complicated step. With complication comes the need for traceability/auditability; the need to understand where content is going and what that content is. This applies whether that content is within the content model or the content object itself.

Having an auditable process, addresses that need. The Vamosa methodology provides two reports, one of which audits where every object will end up and the second that details what content will exist where within each object. This became an invaluable tool even prior to the content migration for a recent project I was on. We used these reports to discover that two of the security parameters required to control user access to sensitive content were inconsistent in the source content! Without that insight we could have had a Facebook-like situation when it came to the migration execution.

Knowing where your information is, when and how it is being consumed and by whom is important and is an essential component in any smart content migration strategy.


To learn more about where your content may lie download the Five Steps to Discovering the Real Shape of Your Digital Content White Paper.

Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, announced the launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on May 12, 2010 at 8 a.m PST or 11 a.m. EST last week. As a result, there is sure to be a wave of organizations migrating from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 as there was when 2007 was released; but what issues should be considered before undertaking a SharePoint migration?

Gartner have urged enterprises to avoid the use of customizations as much as possible, since this was a real pain point during the 2003 to 2007 SharePoint migration surge. They also suggest that organizations should consider using one of the many content migration tools available; these tools will not nullify the labour costs involved when undertaking a content migration – they can however significantly reduce them, by ensuring that only the required content is migrated.

By undertaking a full content analysis of your content prior to migration, you ensure that content that is no longer required for the business is not unnecessarily migrated to your new repository. It is essential to prioritize content, authorize and make decisions as to deleting old, redundant files or creating new ones. This will ensure that all content meets both corporate and technical standards, while guaranteeing that content is not weighing down the data structures and back up abilities of your new SharePoint environment.

You may also want to consider companies with experience of SharePoint if you’re considering an enterprise-scale data migration.

Do you understand your content lifecycle? Do you even have a content lifecycle? A content governance model, such as Vamosa’s Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) framework is built around control and governance of content from creation, through consumption and on to retirement/archival or deletion. Implementing a governance model will make a huge difference to overall content quality, with streamlined processes resulting in a high percentage of well tagged, standards-compliant and relevant content. There are other benefits too: including cost reductions from increased efficiency; and reduced maintenance and storage requirements. The big question for Records Managers, Web Content Managers, Librarians and other professionals is ‘How can I start to apply this framework and regain control of the information in my organization?’.

Content has always been difficult to control due to its diverse nature and it should be no surprise that it’s not going to get any easier. This article from the eDiscovery Journal raises some of the issues facing organizations in the Web 2.0 era. Not only is legislation being tightened around how information can be used and how it should be retained within organizations, but the number of ways that information can be created has increased dramatically. In addition to the content residing within Content Management Systems (CMS) and email servers, organizations now have to consider the new breed of collaboration and social networking tools that are growing rapidly within the workplace. User-generated content featured in instant Messaging, Blogs, Twitter, Google Wave, Buzz etc. all make it possible for information to exist in a wide variety of locations, yet still “owned” by the company. This type of information cannot be managed or controlled using traditional methods.

Failing to appreciate the need for governance introduces risk and is one of the reasons why enterprise organizations find themselves in a situation where they lose control of their content. There is often no real understanding of either the quantity or the value of information existing within the network. Misleading information can seriously damage a company’s brand and customer service, while duplication can result in increased storage and infrastructure costs. Ultimately, this lack of control leads to an increase in the so called “digital landfill” and the first thing to suffer is content quality and, in due course, the end user experience.

So, where do you start? The first stage of the ECoG governance model is “Initiate”. This really is the stage where you have to plan your strategy and think about the content you need – whose going to use it and when; what are they going to do with it – and also what you can live without. Retention of obsolete or irrelevant information is one of the biggest factors contributing to uncontrolled growth of content within organizations. The Initiate phase fits extremely well with the implementation of a CMS for the first time, or as a ‘take stock’ point ahead of migration into a replacement CMS, but it can also be undertaken on the back of a thorough analysis of existing content. This is the perfect opportunity to rationalize content and ensure quality and relevance are high before populating the CMS. A CMS will only manage content, it won’t deliver governance. For that you need a strategy and policies covering the end to end content lifecycle – ensuring that you not only obtain a high level of content quality, but maintain that level, in order to maximize the value of your information assets.

The boardroom is a busy place with every department competing for resource and time from the decision makers. But often, content is not discussed or not a priority for the board. However increasingly, these decision makers are on the hook for the content stored within their company, or that appears on their Web properties; whether or not anyone in the company created it or even knew about it.

The need for businesses to protect costs and competitive edge has never been greater. That’s why now is the time for organizations to control and structure their content properly across the enterprise and for the board to recognize the benefits for the business and its agenda.

Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) is central to businesses optimizing their existing investment in enterprise content management systems, while reducing costs, improving corporate efficiency, ensuring compliance and reducing their carbon footprint. More specifically, ECoG addresses the following board-level issues:

• eDiscovery - Effective ECoG lowers the risk of being unprepared, and ensures that access to electronic content doesn’t end up being extremely costly.

• Brand Governance – Brand compliance is hugely important for today’s globalized organizations to ensure their competitive messages are consistently communicated to key (and often geographically distributed) communities of interest.

• Reduced Storage – Burgeoning content and the constraints of compliance are inevitably going to have an impact on storage. And while the unit cost of storage is starting to decrease and technologies such as virtualization are coming to maturity, more work can be done to reduce the amount of storage a business uses. In the process of migrating over 100 organizations from one Content Management System to another, Vamosa has found that as much as 50% of an organization’s content is typically redundant. Remove this content, and 50% of a company’s server farm can be freed up, offering a huge saving on operating costs.

• Corporate efficiency – And there are more significant, farther-reaching benefits to be had from effective ECoG. ‘Collaborative working’ and ‘knowledge management’ may be industry buzzwords, but the concepts they represent should be taken seriously by every organization. The ability for a company to capture, share, organize, find and use its knowledge efficiently has a direct impact on its ability to be productive, competitive and ultimately, profitable – yet not all organizations are properly equipped to do this.

To be able to control and structure content properly across the organization – i.e., to achieve effective Enterprise Content Governance – organizations need to improve their content quality. The board needs to understand this importance and put proper resource into achieving effective ECoG. To learn about the five significant steps in the process, download the whitepaper here.